February 4th, 2025The reign of King Donald I has begun
In late January 2017 an insignificant US Republican Party dogsbody named Kellyanne Conway earned long-lasting infamy and ridicule when she told television interviewer Chuck Todd on the Meet The Press program that clearly false claims made by newly elected president Donald Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, were not lies, or “falsehoods”, but “alternative facts”.
It’s worth remembering that Conway trotted out her logic-defying statement in defense of a lie over a trivial matter.
Trump claimed the crowd at his inauguration ceremony in Washington, DC, was the biggest ever seen, which was a demonstrable lie.
Call it an alternative fact, or “untruth”, if you want, but The Lie is the hallmark of the Trump era in US politics.
In 2021 the fact-checking unit of the Washington Post reported that, “By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency – averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day.”
One of the strategies mastered by Trump and those who serve him is to deny and lie whenever confronted by inconvenient facts, and, if all else fails, profess your devout Christian faith. If you keep the lies coming fast and fantastical, any media watchdogs that might choose to check them will be overwhelmed, and the 24-hour news cycle is such that yesterday’s lies will be buried under layers of new lies.
In my 30-plus years living in Australia, it seems to me that political discourse throughout the layers of government was often heated, sometimes rancorous, but generally took place with a policy outcome in sight.
Admittedly, some of Paul Keating’s withering takedowns of rivals were pure theatre: “The little desiccated coconut’s under pressure and he’s attacking anything he can get his hands on,” he said of Liberal leader and future prime minister John Howard; and for another Libs leader, John Hewson, this: “He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up;” and for Howard’s treasurer, Peter Costello, “He’s all tip and no iceberg.”
A lot of Trump’s shameless, cruel, thuggish behaviour has found favour among certain types of people in Australia, and not just fools carrying Nazi flags. Still, I cannot imagine an Australian politician showing such complete lack of human decency as he and his trolls have during the recent fires in southern California.
While the fires raged, while firefighters and first-responders were on the ground, risking their lives, while the people of Los Angeles and its surrounding suburbs were in the midst of experiencing devastation and loss and heartbreak, Trump and his stooges were delivering a torrent of lies to gullible and subservient media about who supposedly was at fault for the ongoing disaster.
Their completely transparent intent was to score political advantage over Democrats and culture-war opponents in positions of authority.
Even before the fires ignited in Los Angeles, Trump was preparing an assault on California’s progressive Democratic political structure.
Here’s a statement he made in September while still on the campaign trail: “…and the reason you have no water, you have the canals, the reason you have no water is because [California Governor] Gavin ‘Newscum’ [his surname is Newsome] didn’t want to do it. I had it all done … So you have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north, with the snow caps in Canada, and it is all pouring down, and they have essentially a very large faucet, and you turn the faucet, and it takes a day to turn it, it takes one day to turn it, it’s massive, it’s as big as the wall of that building right there behind you, and you turn that, and all of the water goes into the – aimlessly into the Pacific, and if they turned it back, all of that water would come right down here and right into Los Angeles … And you have so much water. And all those fields that are right now barren, the farmers would have all the water they needed.”
It sounds like the mad rambling of someone in the throes of dementia, but it’s part of the formula – surround the lies with gibberish and no one knows what to make of any of it. It almost sounds funny, the old fool trash talking about things that clearly don’t exist.
But then his pet media pals pick it up, clean it up, and suddenly the focus isn’t on the victims but on supposed scapegoats: Democratic politicians; the Mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, a black woman; Kristin Crowley, the first openly LGBTIQA+ person to serve as Los Angeles fire chief; and a tiny endangered fish, the smelt.
As Trump and his minions embraced and amplified the lies, officials who could have been working on recovery efforts, instead were forced to spend hours defending themselves from false accusations.
On January 20, as he was taking the oath of office to become US president for a second term, Trump took a moment to further denigrate the people who battled the Los Angeles flames. “From weeks ago, without even a token of defense, they’re raging through the houses and communities.”
“Without even a token of defense”, he said. I wonder how the thousands of first responders with boots on the ground, putting their lives on the line, feel about that.
After many happy years living in Victoria and working at The Age, journalist and former Wheatsheaf resident Jeff Glorfeld, and his wife Carol, went back to California, the land of his birth, where in the past seven years he has survived bushfires, snowstorms and drought. And Trump. And Covid. And Trump again. The cicadas and locusts didn’t arrive. Well, not yet. Jeff is also the voice behind The Down Under Hour which is broadcast every Wednesday at 1pm, in California, on radio KKRN 88.5FM. The show can be live-streamed at KKRN.org. In Victoria that’s 7am Thursday. Several programs have been archived on the website – well worth a look!
